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AlbumReview: 'Montage of heck: The home recording'
Out now: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is a collection of Kurt Cobainâs private demos, spoken-word and noise experiments
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Out now: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is a collection of Kurt Cobainâs private demos, spoken-word and noise experiments.(Courtesy of Universal Music ) (Courtesy of Universal Music )
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span class="caption">Out now: Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is a collection of Kurt Cobain's private demos, spoken-word and noise experiments.(Courtesy of Universal Music )
Released as something of an audio companion piece for the recent documentary chronicling iconic musician and grunge band Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain's life and art, the compilation album Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is a fascinating-yet-utterly-uncomfortable ' and contemptible ' experience that goes beyond the music it contains.
Made up of private tapes recorded between the late 1980s until his death-by-suicide in 1994, the tape compiles mumbled scraps of song ideas, comedy sketches, noise experiments and other sounds that Cobain clearly never meant for public consumption. It's digging-the-grave at its finest.
Curated by his daughter Frances Bean Cobain and the documentary's director Brett Morgan, the album, like its visual counterpart, is supposed to present Cobain at his truest ' no mythologizing and no filter; an unabashed peep into a rock star's life.
And because Morgan ' like other Cobain biographers such as Charles R. Cross before him ' considers it to be a revelation that not everything Cobain presented to the public contained ' gasp ' hyperboles and punk rock fibs. Rock 'n' roll incomprehension 101 has never felt so finalized.
The brevity of Kurt Cobain's time in popular culture, the way he chose to end his life and the continued commercial scope of Cobain and his band Nirvana's music ever since the release of their culture-changing 1991 single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' guaranteed that his being ' at this point a brand more than a person ' would be at the hands of either self-appointed experts wanting acknowledgment as the one who understood Cobain the most, or simply those with utter apathy about the music but sheer passion for what money the sales would bring. Montage of Heck (Universal Music) is a perfect storm of those two elements.
How Morgan would pick these particular 'songs' instead of the others he had access to is baffling (Cobain's widow Courtney Love and Bean-Cobain gave Morgan permission to rummage through Cobain's collection of tapes).
There are eerily beautiful moments for sure, such as Cobain's impromptu somber cover of The Beatles' 'And I Love Her' and the 10 minute in-progress rendition of rarity 'Do Re Mi', the latter of which represents, perhaps, the saddest proof that Cobain still had plenty to offer musically.
Other snippets of his very rough ideas show just how effective ' so effective that it has become unappreciated and considered 'easy' ' Cobain's ability to weave amazing melodies with very-specific emotion was.
These are showcased in tracks such as the bittersweet 'Poison's Gone', the elegiac acoustic 'Letters to Frances' (there is no info on who titled these tracks, though many feel very un-Cobain-like) and the promising work-in-progress 'Desire'. There are intriguing sonic experiments too (the ironically reverb-less 'Reverb Experiment', the already-often-released-on-bootlegs 'Beans', the whispered drone of 'Kurt Ambience and the outsider death blues of 'Bright Smile').
The best thing to be said about the record is that the listener can almost feel as if they are in a room alone with the dead singer.
The sense of mournful melancholy is also sickeningly gorgeous, but that has more to do with the context of Cobain's legacy and music ' and the ending that everybody is familiar with, rather than the music Morgan picked. There's a million ways to spin this, but there's no way Cobain would have wanted anyone to listen.
Any Nirvana fan that would shell out the crazy amount demanded for this record 'which contains Cobain tinkering around with noises and tape experiments ' should know Cobain had a wicked, if dark, sense of humor.
As such, Morgan's attempts to showcase the element he considers to be an unknown-side of the singer through tracks such as the spoken word 'Sea Monkeys', seems redundant.
If anything, it is Morgan's misunderstanding of the fandom that negatively permeates and ruins the record, thieving from it any meaning Cobain's tinkering could muster.
There is a great record within Cobain, but represented and compiled by someone who hardly knew him, the experience simply feels invasive and exploitative ' and for an artist who had his private journals published as a book, that's quite an achievement.
' Marcel Thee
